Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

The human controller of a punched card installation was in a position analogous
to a weaver in Lyon prior to the invention of Jacquard’s loom. That is, both were
human operators—or more precisely, human controllers—of machines responsible
for producing complicated products. Jacquard revolutionized the silk industry by
automating the control of looms. Modern computing devices arose from an analogous
innovation, automating the control of Hollerith’s tabulators (Ceruzzi, 1997,
p. 8): The entire room comprising a punched card installation “including the people
in it—and not the individual machines is what the electronic computer eventually
replaced.”
The first phase of the history of replacing punched card installations with automatically
controlled computing devices involved the creation of calculating devices
that employed mechanical, electromechanical, or relay technology (Williams, 1997).
This phase began in the 1930s with the creation of the German calculators invented
by Konrad Zuse (Zuse, 1993), the Bell relay computers developed by George Stibitz
(Irvine, 2001; Stibitz & Loveday, 1967a, 1967b), and the Harvard machines designed
by Howard Aiken (Aiken & Hopper, 1946).
The internal components of any one of these calculators performed operations
analogous to those performed by the different Hollerith machines in a punched
card installation. In addition, the actions of these internal components were automatically
controlled. Completing the parallel with the Jacquard loom, this control
was accomplished using punched tape or cards. The various Stibitz and Aiken
machines read spools of punched paper tape; Zuse’s machines were controlled by
holes punched in discarded 35 mm movie film (Williams, 1997). The calculators
developed during this era by IBM, a company that had been founded in part from
Hollerith’s Computer Tabulating Recording Company, were controlled by decks of
punched cards (Williams, 1997).
In the 1940s, electromechanical or relay technology was replaced with much
faster electronic components, leading to the next generation of computer devices.
Vacuum tubes were key elements of both the Atanasoff-Berry computer (ABC), created
by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry (Burks & Burks, 1988; Mollenhoff, 1988;
Smiley, 2010), and the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)
engineered by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly (Burks, 2002; Neukom, 2006).
The increase in speed of the internal components of electronic computers
caused problems with paper tape or punched card control. The issue was that the
electronic machines were 500 times faster than relay-based devices (Pelaez, 1999),
which meant that traditional forms of control were far too slow.
This control problem was solved for Eckert and Mauchly’s ENIAC by using a
master controller that itself was an electronic device. It was a set of ten electronic
switches that could each be set to six different values; each switch was associated
with a counter that could be used to advance a switch to a new setting when a
328 Chapter 7